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20 Fun Facts About 'Mean Girls'

Netflix just announced that Mean Girls will be available for streaming on January 1, 2015. Here are 20 things you might not have contemplated about this already cult-status classic.

1. MEAN GIRLS WAS INSPIRED BY A SELF-HELP BOOK FOR PARENTS.

Tina Fey was inspired to write Mean Girls, her very first screenplay, after reading Rosalind Wiseman’s bestselling book Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence. As the book’s title suggests, Wiseman offers advice and strategies to parents on how to help their daughters navigate the choppy waters of adolescence. Much of the book contains anecdotes culled from Wiseman’s time spent leading workshops in schools nationwide through Empower, a non-profit anti-violence program she cofounded.

“You may feel that it’s not worth making a federal case of not getting invited to a birthday party or letting your daughter blow off one friend for another,” Wiseman writes. “But these aren’t trivial issues; they lay the groundwork for girls faking their feelings, pretending to be someone they’re not, pleasing others at their own expense, or otherwise sacrificing self-esteem and authenticity.”

2. LINDSAY LOHAN’S CHARACTER IS NAMED AFTER TINA FEY’S COLLEGE ROOMMATE...

While studying drama at the University of Virginia in the early ’90s, Tina Fey and her college buddy Cady Garey shared what sounds like a rather squalid apartment in Charlottesville: “We really didn’t have any furniture,” Garey told U.Va’s alumni magazine. “ [We had] just mattresses on the floor and a bean bag in the living room.”

Still, It must have been a pretty great bonding experience; according to the magazine, Cady Garey is the namesake for Mean Girls’ main heroine, Cady Heron.

3. … AND (POSSIBLY) ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.

IMDb’s Mean Girlstrivia page points out that “Cady” also keeps with the spelling of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s maiden name, in a possible shout-out to female empowerment.

4. TINA FEY HAD TROUBLE WITH MS. NORBURY’S MATH-RELATED LINES.

Fey chose to play a math teacher in an attempt to counteract the stereotype that girls can’t do math, she told the New York Times back in 2004. However, she admitted that she did not understand any of the lines she was reciting. So how did she get the dialog? “My friend’s boyfriend is a calculus teacher in the Bronx,” Fey said. “I took his lesson plans.”

“At the heart of Regina George was a really angry kid who had no boundaries or guidance,” Rachel McAdams says in the New York Times’ recent oral history of the film. To channel Regina’s fury, director Mark Waters encouraged McAdams “to listen to Courtney Love at a high volume” (we’re assuming McAdams means she listened to Love’s band Hole) as well as to watch Alec Baldwin’s notoriously menacing, expletive-laden scene in Glengarry Glen Ross.

6. “DAMIAN” INSTILLED SERIOUS COURAGE IN ACTOR DANIEL FRANZESE.

“When I was cast in the role of ‘Damian’ in Mean Girls, I was TERRIFIED to play this part,” Franzese wrote last month on the queer-culture blog Bent. However, in the next sentence, Franzese captures what was so refreshing about Damian: “This was a natural and true representation of a gay teenager—a character we laughed with instead of at.” Franzese says that years after Mean Girls, grown men—some of them in tears—approached him on the street to thank him for being a role model.

Though Franzese says his friends and family have known that he is gay, he decided a decade later to come out publicly. “Perhaps this will help someone else,” he writes at the letter’s conclusion. “I had to remind myself that my parents named me Daniel because it means ‘God is my judge.’ So, I’m not afraid anymore. Of Hollywood, the closet or mean girls. Thank you for that, Damian.”

7. THE DOWNSIDE OF DAMIAN: FRANZESE IS CONSTANTLY BOMBARDED WITH HIS MOST FAMOUS LINE.

Ever since Mean Girls, Franzese is often recognized. “It doesn’t matter where I am; you know it’s me. I don’t really blend,” he told Cosmopolitan. “And sometimes it’s nerve-wracking. I can be talking to someone in a bar and it’s chill, and then they’re like, ‘YOU GO GLEN COCO!’”

Glen Coco was, of course, a minor, if not virtually nonexistent, Mean Girls character. In fact, the back of Glen Coco’s head seems to appear in only the one scene (above) in which he does nothing more than receive four candy canes from an encouraging Damian. Glen Coco, however, has, awesomely and inexplicably, become a meme.

8. THE STRANGELY NOTORIOUS GLEN COCO WAS PLAYED BY A CANADIAN ACTOR NAMED DAVID REALE.

Last year, BuzzFeed’s Jessica Misener conducted an important investigation into Glen Coco and discovered that, though his role was uncredited in the film, his face is actually fully visible in the scene in which Gretchen reads her impassioned essay on Julius Caesar (he’s sitting directly in front of Lindsay Lohan). Misener did some further digging and discovered that Glen Coco was played by David Reale, a Canadian actor who has also appeared on Suits, the U.S. version of Skins, and on a couple episodes of Queer as Folk.

9. GLEN COCO SPEAKS (!!!).

After the Mean Girls anniversary hullabaloo simmered down, Dazed magazine found David Reale and interviewed him about his experience on set 10 years ago. Reale said he had auditioned for another part in the film, but didn’t get it. Still, the next day he wandered over to the set, which was right across the street from his apartment in Toronto, to see if he could score some free food. The director saw him, recognized him from his failed audition the day before, took pity on him, and gave him the tiny non-speaking part of Glen Coco.

“Tina Fey wrote the line, Daniel Franzese spoke the line … I just sat in a chair and tried not to stare at Lindsay Lohan,” Reale recalls. “But I guess it was the first time somebody pointed to me on the street and shouted, ‘YOU GO, GLEN COCO!’ that I knew I was involved in something with a beauty and power that surpassed the mere proliferation of four candy canes to an accidental movie extra.”

Last year, right after playing challenging roles in Les Miserables and Lovelace, Amanda Seyfried told IndieWire that she still looked back at her role as Mean Girls’ rather, um, simple Karen Smith as her best work. “I was so innocent. I was so green,“ she says. “I look back and I’m like, ‘Really, I thought I was doing a terrible job.’ But it was written so well and so wonderfully directed. Mark Waters (the director) made me look good; he made me funny. And Tina Fey wrote the coolest script of all time.”

Seyfried almost played the role of Regina George, director Waters told Vulture. "She tested for Regina and was kind of brilliant, and very different than Rachel's approach,” Waters says. “She played it in a much more ethereal but still kind of scary way. She was more frightening, but oddly, less intimidating."

11. THERE'S A REAL JANIS IAN.

She was the first musical guest on SNL. Ian won a Grammy for her song “At Seventeen,” which is all about Mean Girls’ main theme: the insecurities that go along with being a teenager.

In 2008, she told TIME that she bonded with her friend Janis Joplin over similar feelings. “I loved her. I think we fell in together because we had things in common. We both felt fat. We both had bad skin. We both felt like nothing we wore looked right. We were both outsiders, and she was very protective of me in a really nice way.”

12. LACEY CHABERT HEARS "FETCH" AT LEAST A HUNDRED TIMES A DAY

Perhaps even more iconic than “You Go, Glen Coco!” in the world of Mean Girls is, of course, anything related to “fetch,” as in “That’s so fetch!” (Gretchen Wieners) and “Stop trying to make fetch happen” (Regina George). The whole “fetch” thing is so enduring that even the White House made a fetch-inspired joke involving Bo the First Dog on Twitter this past summer.

The Prez and Co. are not the only ones still cracking fetch jokes. “People tweet at me every day hundreds of times, if not thousands of times [with] lines from the movie: ‘That’s so fetch!’,” Lacey Chabert, who played Toaster Strudel heiress Gretchen Wieners, told Entertainment Weekly. In fact, “fetch” has even followed Chabert offline, to the unlikeliest of places. “I was at the pharmacy and I was sick and trying to get medicine, and the pharmacist just looked at me and goes, ‘You don’t look like you feel very fetch today.’”

13. IT’S APPARENTLY FUN TO TWEET “YOU GO, GLEN COCO!”

Twitter crunched some numbers and “You Go, Glen Coco!” is in the lead for the most-referencedMean Girls lines since 2010. Glen Coco is followed by “So fetch,” “It’s October 3rd,” and “On Wednesdays we wear pink.”

15. ...THOUGH HE MIGHT BE TIRED OF HEARING IT.

16. AMY POEHLER SCHOOLED KEVIN G. ON HOW TO RAP.

Though Tina Fey wrote the Mean Girls script, she left the penning of mathlete Kevin Gnapoor’s talent-show rap to her pal Amy Poehler. “Amy definitely coached him on how to do the rap, and she actually gave him some of the moves and choreography for it,” Waters told Vulture. In fact, an amazing YouTube video (above) exists of Poehler performing the rap circa 2004, with Fey and Lohan as her hype women.

17. KEVIN G. (A.K.A RAJIV SURENDRA) IS NOW A PROFESSIONAL CALLIGRAPHER

18. ROSALIND WISEMAN THINKS TINA FEY MOSTLY GOT HER BOOK RIGHT.

Except in her workshops, Wiseman doesn’t do trust falls. “I do not do trust falls, I have never done trust falls, I will never do trust falls,” Wiseman tells The Wire.

Still, she wouldn’t change anything. “Both Tina and I seem to be trying to carve out space of how to give women [a] voice in public,” Wiseman says. “So it’s pretty cool to have a collaboration between two people who say, 'Yeah, let’s work together to do this, because you’re smart, you’re funny, I think you’re going to do a good job, let’s try.'"

19. SADLY, THERE WILL BE NO MEAN GIRLS SEQUEL.

Though Lohan hinted to Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show that there might be a Mean Girls part deux, Fey told Access Hollywood that it’s not happening. “At most, it would be a panel discussion with a plate of hot wings,” Fey said of any future plans for the Mean Girls film franchise. [Editor's Note: We completely forgot about this, which aired on ABC Family in 2011.]

20. BUT THERE WILL BE A BROADWAY MUSICAL.

Fey, her husband Jeff Richmond, and Tony award-nominated lyricist Nell Benjamin are currently working on a Broadway version of Mean Girls, according to an article in Playbill last summer. (The play will take at least a couple of years to write, according to Richmond in an earlier interview with Vulture.)

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Also on Mental Floss:

DID YOU KNOW? Marlon Brando hated memorizing lines so much that he posted cue cards everywhere to help him get through scenes.
He even asked for lines to be written on an actress's posterior. (That request was denied.)